Intel SSD 320 Firmware Posted, Addresses Bad Context 13x Error
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 17, 2011 3:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Firmware
- Intel SSD 320
How about that for turnaround time? Just two days ago Intel announced that it had found the root cause of the power cycle bug that could leave your SSD 320 in a mostly unusable 8MB state. Today Intel is making the firmware available to the public, presumably after a long period of validation testing.
Intel encourages all SSD 320 owners to update to the latest firmware here, even if you haven't encountered the issue. If you have encountered the problem you can either send your drive in for a replacement or secure erase your drive using Intel's SSD Toolbox and then drop the new firmware on it.
As with all firmware updates, approach with caution. While the update shouldn't be destructive, backups are your friend.
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NCM - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
So we should understand that you've taken the time, trouble and expense to configure a two member RAID with SSDs, but that you don't bother to do backups? And this with a Mac, where Time Machine makes regular, automated backups a trivial affair?Sheesh.
iMotive - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
No CDROM drive in my macbook. That is used for the second SSD.I do backups of my important data. Not time machine however, and i was able to get the SSDs for a really good price and installing them was fine, but that was just starting scratch and I was excited to get a boatload of performance. I'm not a fan of doing the same work for 0 noticeable gains.
I was mainly just wondering how widespread the issue was. If it just randomly showed up after the drives working fine over time, or if was more an 8mb out of the box type issue.
From the sounds of it I guess I will have to set aside some time to do all of this. The main reason is it is a hassle is because I will have to do a drive clone, then uninstall them and put them into my windows rig, as my macbook has no cd-drive. It is used by the second ssd drive bay. Flash them, then I must reinstall them back into my macbook and set up the raid array once more, then transfer the clone again. All just to make sure this doesn't happen to me and force me to do all this. I guess better safe than sorry.
magr01ino - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
The issue seems not to be fixed, in fact there are people posting in the intel community forums that they experienced the bug AFTER having updated to the new firmware again (http://communities.intel.com/message/136655#136655...German tech sites have written about this already, too: http://www.golem.de/1108/85871.html (translated with google: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl...
!@#$% - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
This is definitely still an issue and Anandtech is doing its readers a disservice by towing the company line and reporting it as fixed, The 320 drives are still getting bricked at 8 megs AFTER the firmware update. This thread reports on these specifically:http://communities.intel.com/thread/24339?start=0&...
It's shameful that a company as profitable as Intel not take any action to either fix or recall this product. These drives are currently being sold every day to unsuspecting customers. This totally blows the idea that SSD is secure reliable media out of the water. Single drive laptop users are particularly vulnerable, as all data is lost. Caveat emptor!!!